The Bad Seed

Suborn was his favourite verb
He'd read it in the dictionary and it stuck
Indeed it was his very favorite activity
The thrill of meeting a girl down on her luck -
Freshfaced was best - and prey on her insecurity
He lived for the moment when, under pressure, she would turn
Inside he celebrated, it was all too easy
The school of hard knocks, those lessons learned
The fruits of smooth talking with the steel of coercion
A girl newly suborned was worth the price of admission

He would never betray himself, he kept a cool countenance
His style always approached, but was just this side of flashy
You had to know how to maintain the serene balance
For this was no mere vocation, to resist the lure of easy money
The family business was of no interest for him, no, not at all
No stodgy funeral home for him, no assisted living, why think small?
Why bother? Not when other players were parading around crack dollars

Drugs were too easy, the real challenge was breaking a spirit
That other word, misogyny, was for squares and without merit
Early forties, he'd seen it all, had hardened his mind to it.
A late bloomer perhaps and much to do, even if squalid

Not for him pimp arrest and all that jargon and slickness
That the cats who read too much Iceberg Slim would throw at you.
He bet most of them hadn't even read the books
Nah, start with Donald Goines man, Whoreson Jones
Bringing a prospect into the game was the endpoint
It was hard work, nothing like that show, Hookers at the Point

In the barbershop, he was holding court,
Just about turned it into a serpent's lair
I'd recognized him from the open house
As I sat two seats down in my chair

My barber had slowed to a crawl in crafting my low fade
It turns out that we were all transfixed listening to this man's escapades

I wondered if he remembered me and would treat me as a spoiler
Who'd seen him at a relative low point liquidating his real estate
If he did, he didn't skip a beat, and continued narrating his pot boiler
Again he would repeat:
   "It's all in the game, it's about how you communicate"
Deliberate, this man, there was a detachment to his diction
There wasn't a torrent of words as he spun his fictions
He made sure as he rapped to enun-ci-ate ev-e-ry syl-la-ble
I couldn't figure out what manner of cut he was getting,
   this smooth criminal

She'd been sitting in the corner reading back issues of Vibe
I hadn't paid attention but now realized that, to every man,
   she lowered her eyes.

He coughed, looked over at her and nodded.

She stood up, dropped her drape and started walking.

The legs: vertiginous
The hips: tremendous
The outfit: ridiculous

She walked.
That was all.

The subtext: lascivious
His intent: pernicious

She walked.
I was appalled.

He just wanted to show off his possession
To make a point with this barbershop exhibition

He nodded again.

She slowed and just paraded back and forth
Those few steps between the full length mirror and the front door

An unholy, impromptu airing of the possibilities of the flesh
Such was the shock, there was a collective intake of breath

Meanwhile he ignored the display, he was of a different bent
The promise of sex meant nothing to him, he continued to wax eloquent
About the new girl, the one out of Walnut Creek high school
Who just got her diploma, "I'mma teach her the rules"

She walked.
It could have been a tightrope or a catwalk

"18 and over, and she couldn't wait to come be an earner"

It was uncomfortable, those five minutes of sin
The walk and its soundtrack: the sound of this man droning

Hardly normal, this marshalling of the naked appeal to lust
How would I explain this scene? It amounted to a betrayal of trust

I suppose from the outside you might say
That she was just taking a stroll and stretching
But if you were in the room you knew full well
This was nothing less than slut shaming

I looked around, everyone was silent and amazed
Needless to say, there's a real violence to the male gaze

"Real prospects, man you should see her", he smiled
Then, on second thought, he pointed, "But nothing like..."

She kept on walking.

"Bottom."

She kept walking.

"Right there, my bottom."

She walked.
Turned as she reached the mirror.

Under the cape in the barber's chair
I couldn't help but continue to stare
Still, I couldn't stand this strange ritual
Unnerving, the plain reduction of an individual
Servitude of sorts, call it by its name, exploitation
There was no denying the upshot of this transgression

Yet she wore this woman's work with a mask of normalcy
Floating above it all, she only aimed to please
The blankness in her eyes only strengthened my unease

She walked.

Preening as he was, like an obsequious merchant
Displaying his fleshy wares in the barbershop bazaar
This was premium quality content, the matter at hand
Except that the goods presented weren't rugs or steak knives
The sale of a human soul, a dubious transaction to all eyes
Ashamed, in those few minutes, at the undoubted humiliation
Troubled, to see not resignation but the vacancy of her stare
It appeared to just be work, a thorough subjugation

She walked.

I guess we were the marks, the square johns
Who would never understand the sex worker's situation
Not that the phrase ever crossed his lips
It was rather a panoply of hoes and pimps
A grim masquerade, this march at the carnival
I couldn't bear the tension of that sordid interval

The minutes passed. She kept on walking
While this gremlin kept on talking
Spinning his web of aggrandizing spite
His heart was a full quiver of ice
Arrows of deceit, cunning and sleaze
Our collective souls abased to our hands and knees

She kept on walking.

Pacing, her motion ever more languorous
The simplicity of the act, yet this felt dangerous

All of a sudden he clapped. His haircut was done.
She stopped moving promptly. We remained stunned.

She went to fetch his suit jacket for him
Exquisite silk. She helped him put it on.
Fresh. Wrapped her arm around him as he offered his elbow.
His arm moved lower and tapped her waist just like so
Took a look around as if to inspect his audience
He expertly put on his hat
Then dropped his hand further, and patted her butt

"Bottom power"

The college footballer dropped his phone.
I averted my eyes, thoroughly embarrassed.
Then, an exchange between the two of them
She had never said a word in all this, it was telling
For the first time, she looked into everyone's eyes
Goddamn. I guess this was the temptation he was selling

I felt bad, sick to the stomach at the display of power so feral
Worried, about the corruption of my soul now placed in turmoil
The disturbance continued as they walked out the door
She'd grabbed her drape. Could innocence ever be restored?

There was silence for a few minutes
We were still taking in what what we had witnessed
The clippers hummed unhurriedly on the edge of din
That was the only sound in the aftermath of sin

Eventually: "How about that game?"
My barber unmuted the TV
"The Raiders ain't doing nothing this year..."
No one mentioned anything further
The unwritten code of the streets
"What happens in the barber chair,..."

He handed me the mirror, I inspected the close fade
I added an extra five dollars to what I usually paid

I made my departure from the joint with speed
Full of worry about the woman caught up in this perverse psychology
And those others prey to the admixture of bullying and sociopathy
The mounting alarm also
   about the unknown graduate from Walnut Creek

After the open house, I'd done some research
   but now I had his street name
Not that it really mattered, the pathology of Junior Eddie was the same

At this Player's Ball there was no delicacy
To this evocation, to these fifty shades of sadness
Spectators to this cold blooded glimpse of human brutality
I steeled myself for the journey back from the heart of darkness

When I saw The Roots, The Tipping Point tour, as I remember
After the show, they were passing out these funny flyers
That was in Boston's Combat Zone: The Pimps and Hoes Party
But here in Oakland, I was getting a heavy dose of reality

Back in Cambridge, I'd shared the same barber
   as that Harvard professor
Who skipped around the gates of weighty subjects as he held court
Now I was on the West Coast, living in the hometown of Too Short
The topics were no less troubling,
   but it was a different breed of street philosopher

I tried to commit the details to memory; I headed straight home
This rough trade in sin was material enough for a poem
The bad seed had left me shaken to the core by this encounter
There was no way today that I'd enjoy the food at the Taste of Africa

Like a shopkeeper displaying his lengths of cheap cotton to country housewives, Parrinieddu unwound his roll of lies. His nickname of Little Priest was due to the easy eloquence and hypocrisy he exuded.

— Leonard Sciascia - The Day of the Owl

...

I've never seen this couple again.
When I got home, I racked my brain
For what I could do to intervene
How to protect from this menace to society?
Who could act to relieve my anxiety?
To my shame, I could only pray for healing
For there was no balm that could truly salve.
My antidote: I then wrote the above.

The Bad Seed, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note, let me know if it fits. (spotify version)

• Make The Road By Walking by The Menahan Street Band
  It's quite appropriate that these horns were the main feature of the American Gangster soundtrack
• This Woman's Work by Maxwell
• Shame on me by Alexander O'Neal
• Pimps, Players & Hustlers by Lynden David Hall
  
• Barber Saloon by Mikey Dread
• (If you ain't) Comfortable by Lynden David Hall
  From the same album, this should provde some relief, I try to keep on topic
• Stacey Adams by Snoop ft Kokane
  I ought to have mentioned that Junior Eddie was wearing some Stacey Adams shoes, as befits his alligator inclinations.

See previously: Open House

The statute of limitations has passed and so I can belatedly nominate this piece for The Things Fall Apart Series.

File under: life, conversation, male gaze, prostitution, pathology, sociopathy, crime, violence, culture, observation, perception, street, Things Fall Apart, humour, poetry, toli

Writing log. Concept: July 31, 2007, March 6, 2021

Open House

The only open issue in your mind was whether the house had been a brothel or a boarding house. As you walked out and weighed the ambiguous evidence, you decided on the latter. Either way, what you had seen, what you had smelt, in those ten minutes was misery itself. Human misery. It was a house of forced labour, of lost dreams. To call it an open house was to do violence to the very term; it was the reverse, a closed house in every imaginable way, featuring those elements of coercion, those elements of powerlessness and, especially, those elements of cruelty whose vestiges still lingered inside. It was the kind of cruelty that only men do to others.

But they called it an open house, that's what the sign outside proclaimed. The Wife and you had no clue, you had simply been on your rounds, doing your Sunday house hunting and getting to know the town. It was your penultimate stop that July afternoon. "It sounds like a bargain, it just came on the market. Spacious too." Well now you knew. Real estate.

It was a quiet walk out of the house and you periodically looked at each other, as if to confirm what you both had seen. "I feel like I'm going to cry", she said finally. You simply fumbled around for the Zipcar card to open up the rental. "Me too", you muttered as you waved your piece of plastic in the air above the windshield. The click unlocked the Prius. "I feel sick". Hell you needed a cold shower or a stiff drink.

It was a hot day and there was a stir in the neighbourhood, you hadn't quite noticed it when you had entered the house earlier on. People were beginning to come onto their porches, pointing and peeping at the house. A few had stepped out and were now making their way towards the house for their viewing. Presumably there had been much talk about whatever had been going on in its confines, thus all the neighbours were expectant and interested. They had long suspected that bad things were happening there, this was their opportunity to bear witness. Reflecting on it, you had been a little disturbed at the way some of those children were running amok inside that house. Your own walkthrough had been very sober.

There had been a pungent odour to the place, it smelled of... Well... The smell lingered even as you considered the case. You turned around and looked at the house again. That smell... Yes, it was the smell of unhappiness, of people who slept in shifts... This wasn't student housing, nor indeed was this your garden variety slum housing. There was no pleasure here, this kind of forced labour has the kind of disagreable odour you tried to forget but couldn't.

As if to confirm things, you notice that woman who had grabbed her two children just a few moments earlier, also leaving the house in a hurry. She was silent and grim-faced, dressed in her Sunday best, a school teacher type. Her eyes were disturbed beacons. She knew what she had seen. She knew what this was - a bad house, and she needed to get her progeny out of there before they too became tainted by it. She held on tight to them as she passed you. It was the first viewing, it was an open house. You were all victims.

As you sat in the car the two of you began to compare notes. It's funny how it all came out in a hurry now as opposed to the steady accretion of details when you'd been walking through the house.

"It was young women, coerced into doing who knows what"

A musty smell of resignation.

"Not many laughs in the house."

"It couldn't be a brothel, right?"

Does despair have a smell?

"They must have left in a hurry."

"No. not men. Doesn't smell like men." It was the smell of cheap perfume and women's hair.

"Pommade."

I'd seen many boarding houses of immigrants - men and women. This was disconcerting.

"No, it can't be a brothel. It would be more upscale. I don't think they'd bring clients here. Well..."

"So. A prostitution ring?"

"Yeah... This is where they kept the women until they sent them out to work."

"But what about the basement? Don't you think?..."

"No. Who would come to this place?"

The basement was the tipping point, its aura of unease had unnerved you.

"Here, let me see the flyer again"

"Wonderful Enormous 7 Room Finished basement" was what the flyer had advertised.

"People had left in a hurry... Very recently..."

"There were ..."

Your guess: 10-30 "guests" were accomodated in the house, most likely.

"Prostitution ring. It must be. Young women."

"Young women."

"They didn't have much to do with the neighbours."

"The rooms, the layout... Labyrinth..."

What troubled you most was the absence. Where were the inhabitants? Where were the most recent residents? Were they still in service somewhere, or had the entire operation been shut down? The cots or bunk beds weren't there.

"Cleaned out."

"I'm creeped out."

"Where are they now? I wonder..."

Too many questions and you didn't dare get them all answered for fear of further depression. These places surely exist, houses of prostitution, houses of trafficking even - but do you really want to know?

It wasn't about drugs: this wasn't a crack house or even a crystal meth house like you might have read about in Oakland, or hypothesized must exist in South Berkeley. And it wasn't immigrant workers... It wasn't men who lived here, of that you were sure. You pondered the question, the puzzle of this open house.

Then it struck you that the owner had been there.

"The owner!", you both exclaimed simultaneously.

"The owner. That's right, the owner..." You knew it as you'd walked past him but hadn't wanted to admit it to yourself. Black guy. He didn't look like the agent but looked to have authority, wearing what he did, and standing the way he did in the kitchen. The almost orange suit trousers and the shirt that looked a little dressy. The slightly sharp tan shoes. He was a pimp, a gentleman of leisure. The fruits of his leisure were on display for sale today.

It's funny how these details came back.

You had caught his lecherous assessment of The Wife. Well perhaps not lecherous, just a cool, calm assessment with a practiced eye. How could she be used? She later said as you exchanged notes, "Yes, he was sizing me up. It was that kind of look. There was definitely a sexual angle there".

Was that how he picked up his women, runaways or those who arrived at the Greyhound station barely ten minutes away? The easy triage of the flesh, the evaluation of weakness, a prelude to the approach.

Still, don't underestimate the man, he's been doing this for a while and this house sale is a temporary setback.

People, his people, had recently left the house. It had just been cleared of much of the incriminating evidence, the sleeping cots, but you can't disguise the smell. The house couldn't but reveal its purpose. Sweet misery, the bitter pungent odour of desperation, the heavy vibes of predation.

It was as you had mounted into the attic earlier that the smell really hit you. What was worse as you inspected it, was the realization that someone had been living there, even in that attic. Could it have been a punishment room perhaps?

When you came down from the attic, shaken, and about to get her to leave, The Wife slowly pointed to a door. By that point you didn't know what to think. "I don't want to know what's behind the door". You grabbed her hand and made to leave on. Some things are not worth knowing.

As you passed you saw that the closet held a few desultory cans of paint - funny that. You can't cover over the layers of of iniquity, and they certainly hadn't bothered trying in the house - or maybe they had, yes. You looked around and saw one wall vaguely painted. Well half a room isn't bad. They hadn't even had time to throw on a gesture before the viewing. Barely painted, the rest of the house was left raw and unadorned. They'd just listed it. Talk about an open house.

This troubling puzzle you'd tried to decipher as you walked through this house on [redacted] street.

"I'm steering clear of South Berkeley and North Oakland."

"I'm not doing any more open houses" was your rejoinder.

You returned again to the scene in the kitchen just minutes earlier. There was a certain axis of malignancy in that triangle. The real estate agent, the potential buyer looking for her entree into the society of slum lords, looking to flip the property, and, last but not least, the owner. A ruthless predatory vibe emanating from all three of them.

"It's structurally sound, a steal at that price." The real estate agent had no conscience. She was just selling it. Condescending too, to the couple who had asked for a leaflet earlier - she had dismissed them as window shoppers, not her brand of client. The Wife had observed that this was the most predatory real estate broker in town that was arranging the showing.

"What's a probate record?", asked the buyer, the prospective slum lord.

"Now we're talking", she started her spiel. The owner chuckled.

There was lots of interest in the property per the web site and the open house had gotten quite crowded by the time you were getting ready to leave. Slum housing has lots of possibilities, you suppose.

But you couldn't have been the only ones who recognized the suffocating atmosphere. You thought back to the church ladies clutching their handbags; they had their eyes wide open. The harrowing sights and the smell.

"This housing bubble is out of control. Pimps are getting into the act. We've been here a year, look, this is ridiculous. We've seen what, maybe 150 houses, all these overpriced open houses, and now we've seen this... this... what's the phrase again.. this charnel house, this den of iniquity."

At that The Wife laughed.

You continued, "I'm sure that they used some of the rooms here to have their way with the women. I just don't know. Or did they just use it to keep them and made them work in streets. Where were the women from. Black or Mexican? What do you think?"

"What was that satellite dish for in that concrete backyard?"

"Oh yeah, I saw that"

"Was it transmitting or was it receiving? A bordello?"

"It isn't worth thinking about. Let's go." You started the car.

...

Fifteen minutes later on a lark to detox, you entered the million dollar home listed on the other side of town. You saw the manicured lawns, the granite countertops, the wholesome picket fences of North Berkeley, a world away.

What is this town you live in? Where do you live? How to get a measure of a place? To think just ten minutes away from this...? Do they know what is happening just down the road?

You will never buy a house on that street. You may not believe in evil but this is a dark matter. They were, he was, trafficking in human souls, if not humans flesh and labour itself. You've lost your innocence.

There are people behaving badly... They know, he knew... And you saw it in his eyes. A little embarrassed, perhaps, but it was a way of life, it was his way of life, and he chose it, he'd live with it. Heck, he was even looking to get a bit above land resale value out of the house. The hustle continued.

True, the affair had shut down in a hurry. That they had cleared out within living memory... made things all the more worrying... perhaps just days earlier. Where were the people? Where are the people he was using? Disposable people.

You couldn't bear to do the research. But at the back of your mind, you surely knew. There's a paper trail for sure, if you searched you could put the story together. Trust your intuition, you're the son of a journalist.

...

It had been an assisted living facility ten years ago.

After some more digging on your conjecture, you determined that this was originally a family business. They did things like funeral homes on the Oakland-Berkeley border. The young one, the current scion was obviously into more grisly stuff - he had a stable of women. Probably not picky could even be those Honduras or El Salvador women so beloved in West Oakland. People steered clear of the operation but it was open knowledge what went on there. You stopped digging.

The open house.

There was a sick feeling in your stomach, you have been in the presence of malignancy. And it has been like that for a long while.

The open house.

Where are the women? Where did they go?

The open house.

The stain persists whenever you walk through an open house.

The listing, July 2007

[Redacted] Street, Berkeley, CA

Price: $583,000

Huge Craftsman! Grand Dame In Need Of New Mate! 2594 Sf 5Bd/ 2Bath, Formal Dining Rm.,& Great Home Office; All On Main Floor. Gracious Front Porch & Wonderful Attic. Zoned R2a For Pos.Duplex Use. 1919 Vintage Detail! Wonderful Enormous 7 Room Finished Basmt. W/2 Sep. Pvt. Entry. Open Sun 2-5.

5 Bedrooms, 2 Baths, Main Entry Room - Additional: Basement Finished, Formal Dining Room, In-Law Quarters, Office, Rec/Rumpus Room, Unfinished Room, Utility Room

Postscript

This was the penultimate open house we viewed together in our time in Berkeley. I stuck to my resolve. I called the peak of the housing bubble.

One week after our viewing, Bear Stearns liquidated two of its hedge funds worth billions of dollars due to collateralized debt obligations and subprime mortgages. The stage was set for the Great Recession.

Note: In 2021, the house on [Redacted] Street was listed at over $2 million dollars. It has reasonable bones and was mildly revamped. Presumably the owners are unaware of this aspect of its history

Open House, a playlist

A soundtrack to alleviate my distress. (spotify version)

• Come 2 My House by Chaka Khan
  I could listen to Chaka simply hum for hours. This was a return to form.
• In the House by Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth
• Den of Iniquity by The Norman Haines Band
  Some prog rock that sounds appropriately harrowing given the subject matter.
• House of Wood by Mandrill
  The blues are in order
• Den of Iniquity by Corderoy
• Den of Iniquity by Sonic Republic

The statute of limitations has passed and so I can belatedly nominate this piece for The Things Fall Apart Series.

Next: The Bad Seed

File under: urban, dread, culture, memory, prostitution, observation, perception, life, Berkeley, Oakland, USA, crime, subprime, housing, Things Fall Apart, toli

Writing log. Concept: July 31, 2007, March 6, 2021